THE SUPERMAJORITY

Alarming exposé of the Supreme Court’s “hard right supermajority.”

Along with legislatures stripping minorities of civil and voting rights and gerrymandering safe districts, the Supreme Court, writes NYU School of Law scholar Waldman, is among the foremost “threats to American democracy.” While in office, Donald Trump installed three Supreme Court justices who have transformed the moderate Roberts court into an extreme right-wing institution that, in just three days in June 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade, forbade federal agencies from addressing climate change, and “radically loosened curbs on guns, amid an epidemic of mass shootings.” These actions, Waldman fears, are just the beginning of a struggle over the meaning of the Constitution—a struggle fought, by his reckoning, three times before, most recently in rulings concerning civil rights after Brown v. Board of Education. The current court is focused on “originalism,” which involves trying to “discern exactly what the Founders were thinking.” However, Waldman urges, the Founders assumed that the Constitution would be frequently amended to reflect social change. One great reform came in the 19th century to extend the power of the Bill of Rights to state-level as well as federal actions. Today, with the sullenly taciturn Clarence Thomas and his election-denying spouse at the center of the court, stripping rights, Waldman charges, is the order of the day. In an institution with almost no ethical controls, “Thomas managed to run afoul of the few existing rules that govern conduct.” Waldman counsels a program to sidestep the Supreme Court not by packing it, as some have urged, but instead by strengthening lower courts (Justice John Roberts himself having called for 79 new federal judges), limit court tenure to 18 years instead of a lifetime appointment, and concentrate on building a progressive legislative branch.

A damning account of a Supreme Court gone wildly activist in shredding the Constitution.